Joaquin Buckley is retiring from MMA after one more UFC fight. He made the call after his grandmother, upset by what she watched, told him to get out of the sport.
Buckley announced it Thursday in a video and post on his social media, days after Mike Malott knocked him out in the main event of UFC Edmonton. It was his third straight loss.
The video is short and blunt. Buckley called the Malott fight devastating and said it hit the people closest to him hard. Then he got to his grandmother.
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“Listening to my grandmother speak, and listening to her pray for me over the phone, and really being upset, and her telling me to retire and really kind of get away from fighting, and really kind of get away from the sport because your mind is your biggest tool and your biggest asset, and you don’t want to lose it,” Buckley said, per MMA Fighting’s transcription. “It took a lot for me to listen and digest it, but I took some time, I slept on it, and I prayed about it, and I realized that my grandmother is right.”
In another clip shared by Happy Punch, he was even more direct: “Hearing my grandmother cry because she couldn’t believe what she saw, y’all don’t know how that affected me. The risk and reward don’t match.”
So why one more? Buckley said he asked her to pray for him and give him one last walk to the octagon, because he can’t leave on a loss. He pointed to his kids as the reason he fights so hard, and to his own workload. He’s had 18 fights in the promotion in six years, and he said he needs to save himself from more mileage and more damage. His brother, who’s been training with him, is part of the camp, and Buckley promised no shortcuts this time.
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“But like I said, this the last one. But we’re gonna make our last one the best one.”
The written post added a line that stuck with me. He said he’s given the game more than he should have in some ways, and that this is the point where he stops before he gives up too much of himself.
How he got here
Buckley arrived in the UFC in 2020 and immediately put Impa Kasanganay on the highlight reel for good, winning Knockout of the Year. He started at middleweight, dropped to welterweight in 2023 and ripped off six wins, getting close enough to a title shot to smell it. Then Kamaru Usman beat him at UFC Atlanta last year, and the slide started there. Malott made it three.
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He sits at 11-7 in the UFC with five Performance of the Night bonuses and one Fight of the Night. No opponent or date for the farewell fight has been announced.
My take: fighters almost never say the quiet part this plainly. Buckley looked at three losses, a brutal knockout and a crying grandmother, and said out loud that the math stopped working. I’d love to see the UFC give him a winnable, fan-friendly scrap instead of feeding him to another ranked killer, because a guy who kicked a man unconscious with a flying backspin in his first year deserves to leave with his hand raised and his faculties intact.
